To Lands Unknown
by Sekah
Summary: Author's Universe – When Kaito signs up to be sequestered in a submarine meters below sea level, he's sure that nothing can make his situation worse. Toguro proves him wrong.
1. Dock

**Author's Note:** Weird pairing. Originally from the kink meme. Hope you enjoy it, since I know I enjoyed writing it! Originally I planned to make this as lifelike as possible, but having researched submarines for a nice long period of time I can say clearly, "Fuck it, this is going to be fantasy/science fiction without any material basis." Sorry guys, didn't mean to have to sacrifice believability there, but hell, even to get enough fuel for the voyage would be impossible if I kept it realistic, so I won't. The images of colonized peoples and nations, however, I'll do my best to keep real and respectful. Just a heads-up.

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><p>Kaito fussed, jounced by the cobblestones under the motorcar's thin wheels, the glasses that sat perched on his snub nose held in place by a fretful hand. His hair was slicked back for this important occasion, pampered and trimmed by his overzealous mother only moments before he'd climbed into the black open-air roadster, which he'd tried not to marvel at, still used to the horse-drawn hansom cabs that even now trotted and careened around the car come to take him to his new assignment.<p>

He convinced himself his actually rather peevish expression was regal, when he found time to think between between clutching the trunk containing his research tightly between his knees and wincing when he heard the clink of glass on every major bump. Of course it was regal. Kaito couldn't believe he was betraying his jangling nerves and coarse excitement as he was ferried through the sooty streets of London on this, March the 11th of 1903. No, indeed, Kaito must be showing only his calm, cool, and collected nature on such a fortuitous day.

Putrid smog and a collecting fog off the Thames coiled around the streets of London, coal fumes from the factories that inundated the city and its outskirts filling the air with poison, the busy calling of men and clanking of machinery, whinnying of horses and chatter of ladies and shouts of ragged beggar children so usual as to remain unnoticed by the young botanist, called to defense of the glory of the Empire, come to dwell among the tribes of a far-off land and collect samples of their linguistic habits and rare and fantastic plant matter.

_Eat your heart out, Kurama,_ he thought smugly, overlooking the fact that only a sudden worsening of his mother's condition had stopped Kaito's archrival from applying for this job with the East India Company as well.

But Kurama was at home, and Kaito's tearful family had just sent him off for a prosperous venture into the great unknown. Kaito practically vibrated at the thought, though a sudden jerk over a particularly malformed cobblestone nearly sent him bouncing off the high seat of the horseless carriage and into the dirt next to it.

The roadster, Kaito knew, belonged to Mr. Sakyo, the cold-eyed and unsettling patron of this voyage. Kaito was to perform as the medic, linguist, and had a few other duties he'd glossed over on the day he'd signed the contract, too eager, frankly, to worry overmuch about whether he'd have to help out the submarine's chaplain or such. The car turned suddenly off of the busy mainstreet it had been chugging down towards Dockside, and in a moment, they were at the docks.

Kaito craned his neck, awed by the marvelous industrial wonders that lay spread before him like a feast. Ocean liners, the beautiful and enormous temples to modern technology, towered over all other ships. Fleets of fishing boats, sloughing blood over their sides and covered in cawing, flapping seagulls, jarred side-by-side with pleasure yachts of the rich nobility and massive battleships brimming with guns. Dockworkers were everywhere, crawling like an infestation of spiders around ships and over ramps, roaring to one another as sailors and soldiers wove inbetween them, staggering as though drunk without the constant movement of the sea beneath them, or perhaps, in fact, drunk. Dockside was covered with holes for such men to indulge in their dirty excesses, and that, and the rotting stench of low tide, made Kaito's nose turn up in disgust.

"Won't be long now," the driver, who had identified himself as Gokumonki, said reassuringly as he maneuvered the shockingly finicky and mysterious equipment that made this machine run with ease, taking them through the intermingling dockhands turning to look at a real horseless carriage and the masses of stacked crates. He was a big man with a mane of tough hair like winter scrubs and a salt-and-pepper beard in a strange pattern over his chin. Kaito continued to stare around him, nostrils flaring at the scent of salt, feeling intimidated.

Kaito was craning his neck to look behind him, almost bug-eyed at the sight of one of the towering white sides of an ocean liner, the Queen Anne, nearby, when the motorcar suddenly ground to a stop, almost throwing Kaito face first onto his research.

"And here we are!" Gokumonki chortled, hopping down from his seat in a spritely fashion and laughing at the queasy look on Kaito's face.

Kaito gulped and turned, taking his first look at his home for the next few months.

Demon, which was the name of this beautiful siren, was huge, bigger than Kaito had thought it would be. He couldn't stop his in-breath at the size of it, the undeniable splendor of long cylindrical steel, polished to a shine reminiscent of silver, bobbing tightly in the water, which was green and rancid with algae. The sub was hooked to the dock by ropes and chains and ramps which men, Kaito's new cabin mates, clambered over again and again, cursing and lugging crates from the dock to the hatches at the semi-flat top and back again. Kaito had been told that Demon was the biggest of its ilk ever to be built, but that hadn't fully prepared him, hadn't even begun to make him understand a machine large enough to skate underwater like a snake, and carry a hundred and fifty good men besides, marines and shipmen and who knows who else.

Sleek sides were interrupted by portholes and, along the top, one particular periscope that clearly led down into the bridge, personal headquarters of the Captain. The blunt nose bobbed lightly in the frothy cresting waves, its streamlined sides tapered, with the powerful blades at the back covered in men, men greasing, examining, shouting to one another as they made sure that the engine would carry them safely to the ivory coast of Africa.

Kaito's heart began to beat, strumming against his chest with excitement. Far-off lands, adventure, fascinating new discoveries –

"Mr. Kaito."

- they all awaited him, so close he could practically _taste_ their delicious nectar.

"Mr. Kaito!"

If only this buffoon would stop yelling. "What?" he snapped, looking up to see Gokumonki, and was surprised by a chuckle. He turned sharply, pushing his glasses further up his nose, to see a mountain.

Kaito gasped and leaned back, staring up, far up, into a rugged face blank and amused, which stared down at him from a soaring height. The man chuckled again, and Kaito's face flushed a splotchy, enraged red.

"So this is the boy?" the stranger asked, arching an eyebrow and examining Kaito in a way that made him strangely uncomfortable.

"I am no boy," Kaito sniffed, sitting up straight, his legs clenching unconsciously around the wooden trunk containing his research. "I'm twenty, almost twenty-one already."

Another chuckle had him glaring, "Well, come on then," the giant rumbled, turning away with his hands sliding into the pockets of his workman's trousers, several sizes larger than Kaito had known they could be made, and began striding confidently towards a nearby ramp.

Kaito blinked, and then colored again, enraged. "My luggage!" he groused, practically pouting.

The man stopped, his back still facing Kaito. "Carry it," he responded calmly.

"I have three trunks!"

The man turned, his annoyance enough to make Kaito huddle back with unnameable fear. _Surely this man is just a ship's hand,_ Kaito thought. _I'm certain I outrank him – he'll never lay a finger on me. Why am I scared?_

"You were told to bring one trunk, medium-sized, two at the most." Kaito sputtered at the disdainful inflection to his rich, deep voice. "If you were fool enough to weigh down my vessel with three trunks, all larger than the one trunk should have been, then you're fool enough to carry them yourself. I won't waste any of my men's time with your idiocy."

"My vessel? _My men?"_ Kaito gasped aloud, eyes popping at the implications.

The man shook his head. "And Mr. Sakyo said you were smart. I'm Toguro, Captain of the Demon. At your service," he said, nodding, and then turned and walked back towards the submarine, completely uncaring of Kaito's distress.

"Wait," Kaito shouted, "wait!" He scooped up his research materials and the smaller clothes trunk, sparing a sad glance at his third, which was completely stuffed with books, and scrambled to catch up. Maybe this Toguro character would let him pick it up later.

This struggle was, in Kaito's opinion, more torturous than the labor of Sisyphus, eternally rolling his boulder up Hades' hill. The trunks banged excruciatingly against his knees, surely drawing raw chafing marks by now from the rubbing of his starched trousers. After this short but humiliating walk over the ramp, every breath was a pathetic whimper, every step a limp, every blink almost letting out a tear. Toguro adjusted his pace occasionally to let Kaito catch up, but that was as far as his kindness went.

When they reached the main platform, Kaito was breathing in great honking gasps like a beast of labor, his saliva flecking his lips with foam, reminiscent of a racehorse's muzzle after a cross-country run. His clumsiness had certainly shattered all the beakers he'd brought with him by now. The normally prim man wanted to smack Toguro with his luggage and curse wildly, shout expletives that would make even these sailors blush, but was too winded and unnerved by the giant fellow to try.

Kaito dropped his trunks unceremoniously when he stood in front of the hatch, bow-legged and sweating profusely, ruing the thumps and clatters of his abused equipment. He heard amazed laughter around him, and even a couple of jeers, and was amazed at how much he wanted to scream and turn around, announce that they would all be punished, demand to be taken home.

Big hands suddenly wrapped around his, disentangling his moist palms from the handles and gripping them lightly. Kaito looked up into Toguro's angular face, his skin paling beneath the freckles.

"You're making all that noise over this little weight?" Toguro snorted derisively. "Pathetic."

And then the big man hefted his clothes trunk over his shoulder with the research hanging at his side, and maneuvered them both and himself down the stairs leading through the hatch with no more trouble than if he'd been carrying a lady's purse instead of two overstuffed trunks.

Kaito stood blinking and panting for a moment, listening to the men's snickers, but at a _hurry up_ from Toguro, he began to climb quickly down the hatch and into the subdued, cramped lighting of the sub, his new home, nervous of what he'd find.


	2. Quarters

"This is the mess hall, where you'll take meals."

"Right," Kaito muttered, not glancing up from his feet.

"Rec room," Toguro said, and this time Kaito looked inside at a constrained hollow with two tables and six chairs, and a small metal bookshelf fastened to the floor and half-full with tattered books. The sight didn't fill Kaito with hope or joy, as he thought it would. He found himself wondering unkindly if Toguro and his men could even read.

"This is the control room, the bridge and the sonar room. The barracks, kitchens, heads, and bunks are down below, as is the hold. Count yourself lucky: you'll have your own room, up here, near to my own. Further along this hall you'll find the engine room, fuel tanks, torpedo rooms and launch gear, which you shouldn't have to deal with."

"May I go back to get my books?"

"Books?" Toguro asked, pausing and turning to cock an eyebrow, nodding to a man who saluted him casually with a "Cap'n," which had been repeated over and over since they'd entered the innards of the sub.

"My third trunk. It was filled with books. I'd like to have it," Kaito said with the stiff, wounded dignity of an offended adolescent.

Toguro snorted, recognizing the bratty tone, and then turned, glancing around. "Swordfish," he growled, and a shirtless man with skin the color of deep black tea and a hawkish expression on his handsome face looked up from the discussion he was having with a sallow-looking man, tall, with long blue-black hair and a peaked, pale, cruel face.

"Cap'n."

"Go topside and find Gokumonki, Sakyo's man. There's a trunk lashed to the back of his motorcar. Bring it down and meet us in the medic's room."

"Sir," the man drawled, his accent impossible for Kaito to place, and then he saluted lazily and loped off, all gangling limbs.

"Hey girl," the man Swordfish had been talking to sneered. Kaito looked around, and then realized the addressee had been him.

"I'm a man!" he yelped, but the sailor just cackled nastily.

"You've got to earn manhood, girl. Work your way up from girl to boy, and from boy to man, and I'll call you the gender you've earned, hm?"

"Karasu," Toguro said, his voice a threat.

"Cap'n." Karasu saluted nonchalantly, then got up and left, his eyes lingering strangely on Kaito's face, like groping hands. It was a bizarre confrontation, and Kaito leaned in closer to Toguro, suddenly glad for his quasi-protection.

Here he was, squared away in a room not fit to be called a closet, the only furniture a single chairless table that he had been informed was used for surgical operations, with the blood stains to match. Most of the space in this hole was taken up by his trunks, which now looked ludicrous in comparison to the bowed in walls and narrow ceiling. It was only a few hours into their voyage and already, Kaito felt miserably claustrophobic.

He'd met the chaplain when he'd gone topside, sullen and freezing as the ramps and chains were taken back and he'd found himself waving halfheartedly to the curious onlookers come to see a real live submarine take off. The chaplain was nice, but naïve: Brother Koenma, he'd called himself.

This hole was dank and cold. Kaito's nightshirt and the thin blankets of this rock-hard bunk were inadequate protection against the frigid seawater leeching heat from around them. Toguro had told him to stay out of the way, and Kaito intended to do just that, not liking any of his fellow crew enough to attempt to socialize now that dinner was over and the mess hall stood mostly empty.

Kaito realized clearly that three or four months of this might drive him insane. It was an isolating experience for a man who had never thought he'd needed anyone but himself and his intelligence in this world. In truth, he envied Kurama as much as he loathed him, as much for his easy friendships and adoring family as his brilliance, a hard bitter fact that he could only admit to himself in this quiet and dim murk, with the thrum of the engine all around him like a separate pulsing heartbeat.

Machinery clanked and men spoke with voices too low to make out words, just a weird susurrus under the sinister sounds of this strange beast in motion.

Kaito got up, reaching towards the book trunk to find something to distract attention for a few hours until he could sleep, when he heard a knocking on the door, the _clink clink clink_ of rapping knuckles.

The door opened while Kaito chirped, "Come – come in!"

He was surprised to be intruded upon, wondering whether some friendly soul had come to greet him, or whether his expertise as a doctor was needed so soon. Toguro ducked into the room instead, too big to stand up fully. Kaito blinked when Toguro closed the portal behind him with an echoing clink, turned the lever that locked the hatch, and then dragged a trunk in front of it to further impede anyone trying to get inside.

The entry secured, Toguro turned back to Kaito, who still sat half out of his bed in a long white nightshirt, wondering if the confrontation he'd been fearing was about to happen, cursing Toguro's cleverness in catching him so off-guard.

"Relax and don't fight this, boy," Toguro rumbled, voice like a lion's purr, and the young man blinked, eyes widening. Distress spiraled through Kaito's system when thick fingers reached up and began popping round black buttons out of their holes in the coat Toguro had put on once they'd left the harbor, a strange khaki military uniform that hung down his knees.

"What are you doing?" Kaito yelped, shying away.

Surely not. Surely all those jests and stories – yarns that sailors, pushed beyond morality by the long, isolating voyages over open sea, did such insane things as have relations with another man – were just that, stories. Besides, they hadn't been out of the harbor for a full day; he couldn't have been driven to desperation so quickly!

Toguro stopped, an eyebrow rising with surprise at his reaction, even as he shrugged out of his coat and laid it over one of Kaito's chests.

"Put your coat back on this instant!" Kaito hissed like an offended kitten, frankly alarmed at the turn things seemed to be taking.

Toguro smiled ruefully. "You didn't read the contract, did you."

"What?" This time Kaito's tone warbled, imitating a teenager whose voice hadn't deepened yet. "I – I read it! I'm ship linguist, ship medic, and…"

"And the outlet for my frustrations," Toguro said matter-of-factly. Kaito gaped. "Well, you know how it is," he said, smiling, and inviting Kaito's indulgence. "No women, long absences, things get pent-up. It fogs a man's head up, not having a place to relieve his tensions."

"Th-then a-all the m-m-men," Kaito whispered, stuttering in horror. Toguro saw his trepidation and shook his head.

"No, don't worry. I'm not cruel – you'll only have me to deal with. The men will make do as they always have. Come now, it won't be so bad."

With that, Toguro smiled and walked forward, skirting the three trunks. While he walked he undid his undershirt, his eyes, which had seemed almost genial up to this point, darkening.

Kaito stood rigid with terror for a moment, then rolled off the bed and jumped up, stumbling to the other side of the surgeon's table, just barely squeezing into the gap between table and wall. "I do not consent!" Kaito yelled sharply.

Toguro shook his head and chuckled, merely changing the trajectory of his walk through the room. Soon Toguro, bent over, was face-to-face with Kaito, and examining him like a bought horse, though without touching. He saw the following: a young man with freckles dusted disproportionately all over his face, a puckish nose, small black eyes now widened with fright, hair that was already returning to a wiry poof above his head.

"The other boy was prettier," Toguro said dismissively, "but you'll do just fine."

"The other – _Kurama?"_

"Was that his name?" Toguro asked idly. "Ah well. Come out from there or I'll force you out."

Kaito felt almost disappointed to find that even in being used sexually against his will Kurama outranked him. He shook himself like a dog to clear his head, and squeaked, "No! I'll scream!"

Toguro's eyebrow rose, Kaito recognizing it now as a show of Toguro's anger. "Scream," he growled softly, every word laced with a very real threat, "and either one of two things will happen: the men will find out you're offering sex, and come to you to relieve aches in other places, Doctor, or you will annoy me enough that I'll surface, throw you over the side of the vessel, and then leave you there to slowly drown, or be torn apart by sharks." Toguro's head crooked. "Whichever comes first."

Kaito cringed back against the unforgiving metal hull, shaking, his hands clawing at the underside of the table as he gripped it for something to hold on to. "You wouldn't," he pleaded, knowing the truth even as he said it. Something about this man made him think that he was used to offering death to enemies and anyone else who dared to cross him.

Toguro's horribly blank silence was answer enough, and Kaito cowered.

"Come out of there, or I'll drag you out," the man said finally.

"No!"

Toguro, bent over under the curved ceiling, put his foot on the end of the table and pushed, crushing Kaito back.

Kaito gasped, fear sweat running down his back. "You're hurting me!"

Toguro put more strength into his foot, nothing recognizable on his face. "I don't want to treat you like this. It'll stop when you agree to come out."

Kaito moaned, bent in half, his forehead and upper body resting on the wood of the very table that was crushing the air from him. "Please," he wheezed, "it hurts."

Toguro said nothing, pushing yet harder, much stronger than the hands that tried to lever the table away and free his upper body.

Kaito looked into Toguro's frightening face, aloof as a statue, and closed his eyes, hating himself for the tears that squeezed from between them.

"I'll come out," he gasped, "please, I'll come out."

"Good," Toguro said, and instantly reached down and pulled back the table, his expression unknowable and unreadable through the tears swimming in Kaito's eyes.

No sooner had the young man struggled out from behind the heavy furniture, breath rasping out in degraded puffs and a hand over his bruised stomach, than Toguro encompassed the back of Kaito's neck with a big hand and frog marched him towards the bed.

Kaito panicked when he saw their destination, and yelled _no_ a few garbled times, as uselessly and futilely as if he were shouting at a force of nature, yelling no, no at a tempest or a lightning bolt, until the giant backhanded him sharply, making his ears ring and his vision burst and twirl with colors like his little sister's kaleidoscope. Toguro told him to be quiet. He was annoyed at Kaito's sniveling, Kaito saw, not afraid of intervention._So I really am alone,_ Kaito thought, and his chest hurt, all his grandiose pride leaking out into the ocean that surrounded him, where it sunk as if weighted by stones. Kaito was very aware of the flimsiness of their vessel, very aware of the danger outside its walls. He couldn't think rationally, couldn't even find a cutting insult to fling, feeling like he wes already drowning.

He was helpless, and Toguro preferred it that way.

"I won't kiss you, boy," Toguro was telling him when he swam back to full consciousness after the blow, tasting blood. "I'll let you learn that with a woman, as a man should." Kaito was being maneuvered, his head on the pillow and his ass in the air like an offering. Toguro pushed Kaito's knees up further, and then knelt behind him, his body curled over Kaito's smaller one and throwing him in shadow. Kaito felt abhorrently small in comparison to it, to the one hand resting next to Kaito's face and the other that could be heard undoing Toguro's trousers and shoving them down.

Toguro looked down and noticed the man's shaking, and patted him fondly on the side, making Kaito feel like a horse whose withers are slapped before being ridden.

Ridden. That was what was about to happen. He would be mounted and rode, losing all masculinity and selfhood and becoming a hole for another man to _fuck._

The word fuck flustered him further, enraged him, and he jolted forward, turning his head to glare.

Instead, his eyes fell on the weapon to be used against him, held lightly in Toguro's bearish hands, and yet again, he gaped.

Toguro was anatomically consistent: that was his first thought. _I'm going to bleed to death if he puts that inside me_ was his second.

"No!" he yelped, jolting forward, though a hand on his stocky hips pulled him back. "No, God please, Toguro, I'm begging you, no no no, it won't fit," Kaito pleaded wildly, trying to wriggle out from under the hands that restrained him.

"Here now," Toguro grunted, masturbating his massive cock for a moment, eyes half-lidded at the feel of his own hand, "no need to get so upset. I brought some oil. This will hurt, but you'll get used to the pain soon enough. In a few weeks you'll think nothing of it. They always do."

"Th-they?" Kaito squeaked, his suspicion that he wasn't the first in this sad position finally confirmed.

Toguro just laughed, a hand on his erection to guide it as he pushed the blunt head into the offered hole. Suddenly, Kaito was screaming into the mattress, head reeling from splitting, agonizing, intimate pain. He cried, all big rolling tears and honking sobs and gasps, while his face turned red and his whole body tensed like a coil pulled so far it stretched straight.

The pain vanished for a moment, leaving him weak and shaky, kept upright by an arm looped under his waist. "Whoops, forgot the oil," Toguro rumbled, laughing momentarily, and Kaito flinched, hating this, hating with all his heart the feeling of being used like this, despising the man above him. His back was hunched against the pain, the thin arches of vertebrae in a smooth curve down his slightly pudgy sides and fantastically freckled shoulders.


End file.
